Here’s Where the Afghan Massacre Was Launched

A satellite image of Zangabad, Afghanistan. Image: Google Earth

The U.S. military has tried to keep a lid on Sunday’s massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, allegedly by an Army staff sergeant. In addition to keeping his name secret, the military hasn’t disclosed name of the southern Afghanistan town of the victims, or the base where he was assigned. But Danger Room has confirmed that the sergeant was assigned to a small combat outpost called Belamby, not far from the town of Zangabad in volatile Panjwai district.

It’s a violent place. The Taliban want it back, and the locals just want to be left alone. Those who’ve been there recently fear that the damage to the local U.S. mission, a “village support operation” run by U.S. special operations forces, may be irreparable.

Nearby Zangabad is a microcosm of the district, according to Seth Jones, a Rand Corporation analyst and adviser to the U.S. Special Operations Command. He’s visited the town and the surrounding district several times. The villagers in Zangabad have “seen a lot of violence over the past decade,” Jones tells Danger Room. Their elders are “not strongly supportive of either the Taliban or the [Afghan] government,” preferring predominately to be left alone.

Even before the alleged murders, that has rarely been possible. The area is just a few miles southwest of Kandahar city, and to the east lies the Taliban stronghold of Quetta, in Pakistan. While Panjwai was once a Taliban stronghold, the troop surge of 2010-11 pushed the insurgents out. They’ve fought to get it back ever since. Taliban tactics include “all kinds” of attacks, Jones says, including “ambushes, raids, very specific targeted assassination, [and] infiltration into Afghan units.”

Among those assassinations: Panjwai’s deputy provincial governor. On January 12, insurgents killed him, two of his sons and two police officers using a car packed with explosives.

Days later, the NATO command launched Operation Pan Kalay, a mission across the district — a terrain characterized by grape and poppy fields — to capture explosives used for homemade bombs. The sheer volume of those bombs caused the Canadian soldiers who used to be stationed there to nickname the town “Zangaboom.”

The Canadians had a long and grueling history in Zangabad. In 2006, they fought a grinding battle known as Operation Medusa there to push the Taliban back, but didn’t establish a permanent presence. Zangabad fell back into insurgent hands, and became so secure for them that the Taliban used the town to bury their war dead. In late 2010, Canadian, U.S. and Afghan forces pushed back in, with the intent to secure the road to Kandahar city. This time, they set up a base in Zangabad, which they turned over to the U.S. in June 2011.

Yet it’s been hard to keep the Taliban down for good. Much as in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley, insurgents in the area rigged civilians’ mud homes and compounds with bombs. That threat led a battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Flynn, to flatten three empty villages in the Arghandab in October 2010. In February 2011, senior U.S. military officers warned that such a fate was in store for Panjwai as well.

“The question is, what was the relationship with elders beforehand, how strong was it, what were the condolences and range of efforts [at amelioration] after, and can these relationships be revived?” Jones says. “It’s hard to know that.”